The fortress was a former monastery to which the Seer had added battlements, enfilading walls, vast gatehouses, and sheer-walled trenches. Masons and engineers worked around the clock improving the defences, even working at night by brazier light.[4] Ramps led to the gates of the outer and inner walls. The inner ramp was 100 paces long and flanked by steep trenches littered with human bones. Within the walls of the inner gates were a stable and the Seer's central tower.[5]

The bottom floor of the Seer's tower consisted of a single, empty, high-vaulted chamber whose ceiling was made up of a chaotic maze of buttresses, spans, arches, and false arches. A skeletal bronze staircase led upwards from the centre of the room. Forty-two steps above lay the tower's second floor, which was used as a torture chamber. The room was cluttered with instruments of torture and the walls were adorned by human skins stretched out like tapestries. The stairway continued upward past many more levels of dimly lit chambers. Atop the tower was the Seer's chamber. Inside the windowed room was a wooden chair.[6] Somewhere on the tower was a balcony from which the Seer could deliver holy benedictions upon his army.[7]

In the early days of the Siege of Capustan, the Pannion Seer occupied Outlook along with a K'Chain Che'MalleMatron, who lived in a cave below.[9] It was at Outlook that Lady Envy and her party sought to assassinate the Seer and rescue Toc the Younger from the clutches of his armies. The Seer's defenders and his Omtose Phellack powers, which filled the nearby valleys with ice, were not enough to prevent Envy and the others from taking the fortress. Though Outlook fell, the Seer was able to retreat to Coral, taking Toc and the Matron with him.[10]